Melbourne was a different world in the early 1990s. The Pyramid Building Society collapse had ripped the guts out of the state’s finances; long-established footy clubs were handing around the tin at home games, schools closed, public utilities were sold off and local councils amalgamated. Like a dark Melbourne winter, sunshine seemed a lifetime away.
But there was light, if you knew where to look, in the dingy corners of the Punters Club on Brunswick Street, and the Bakers Arms in Abbotsford. You’d probably find the Dirty Three lurking around, maybe Kim Salmon and the Surrealists and, if you were really lucky, Charlie Marshall and the Body Electric. Marshall formed the Body Electric shortly after the demise of Harem Scarem, the band featuring Charlie and his elder brother Chris. By 1994, Marshall had recruited the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis and Jim White, and Surrealist and Beast of Bourbon Brian Hooper, releasing an eponymous EP and a studio album, I Don’t Want It.
Won’t Give Up holds a torch back to those distant days. Comprising the six tracks from the EP, seven tracks from I Don’t Want It, and four previously unreleased demos, this is a sublime trip down memory lane. Marshall’s deft melodies are dosed with the grime of inner-city Melbourne. Cop a listen to Likes of You, or the mesmerising syncopated rhythms of Won’t Give Up, or the freakishness Weightless, and you’re lost in a world of sweat, dollar pots and whatever else’s on offer. There are love songs like you’ve never heard them: glistening beauty in Yearning Burning Circus, Bowie-like lamentation in Release Me, and European romance in Sing Me A Song.
The album tracks have a sharper edge: Fall is the sound of impending doom, Ease the Pain and Doing Allright are old fashioned rock’n’roll tracks for the good ol’ boys and girls of the Melbourne music mafia, and Strength is all sparseness and spirituality. There won’t ever be a time like this again, but listening to this record, you can feel what it was like.
BY PATRICK EMERY
